Note:
Hi. This is my attempt to fill in the missing pieces of Nosgoth's ancient history that we never got to see in the games. It's meant to be high fantasy, as if you just pulled this mysterious grimoire down off a shelf in the Willendorf library only to find it contains Nosgoth's Old World legends, like Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's really the story of Elder God's twisted dealings with the ancients, in the same way that Star Wars really boils down to the story of Darth. Though I'll be tackling other mysteries along the way too. Don't be alarmed by the flowery antiquated style of this first overview chapter. It'll get more straightforward and easier to read after this and you can skip it of course if it's causing you actual pain! I just felt this intro should sound eloquent since it's spoken by a demon trying to shake the reader and challenge his/her beliefs. Anyway, enjoy!
A Demonic Overture
Παράδεισος; Eternity; Ohm; Nirvana; ∞.
Many are the names of heaven invoked in vain by mortal creatures as they implore the empty skies to come remedy the great hurts of this, their forlorn existence. Of their gods and myths, all are lies and distortions; unheard and unanswered go the many entreaties made in the name of such contrived beings as these. Why then is there to be found, amongst all the sundry tribes, such enduring belief in divinity unseen? And how is it that, though found nowhere in the natural world, divine ideals have come like a contagion to infect the minds of mortals with yearnings for perfect justice, benevolence, renown, betterment—the strivings upon which their very civilizations were founded?
Even now they persist in the hopes of enacting a better world. For all innately feel betrayed by the world that is and bereft of the more perfect one that should have been. So the living seek to bring about the ideal world in all that they do. They derive bliss from imposing order on their shattered reality so it more closely resembles the blessed realm of their imagining. They see beauty in works of art according to how well each succeeds at bridging this separation. They feel the wrongness of a reality that sunders them from their dreams.
But whence comes this awareness that has turned them into soldiers for Order? As if they darkly recollect having been torn from perfection and plunged into chaos. Surely this disparity is felt most acutely in that part of themselves they term the soul.
For it is there, buried deep inside them, that some instinct recalls a time now lost to memory when the heavens Once truly deigned to respond to mortal cries!
All the many religions of the world arose from this grand intercession, this event so inspiriting and so unique in all of time that even unto this day its echoes ring in the hearts of those bloodlines whose ancestors hearkened to the whispers of the holy. The living were imbued with genuine and terrible purpose then. The divine had at last condescended to bestow their touch upon the world of mortal affairs grim and gray. After an eon of deliberation, they risked to pour their undefiled grace and precision out of the heavens into realms Overrun by a chaos stronger than any uplifted prayer. Spending much of their dwindling potential on the effort, the heavens sought to impose a wellspring of undying hope onto a world of such abject misery that the living had heretofore despaired of ever healing it, since none could oppose its brutality and survive.
Embarking upon their great endeavor, the holy acted then to alter the shape of things to come by elevating the futures of the sentients who crawled the earth or delved beneath or who swam its oceans. All this was done so as to fracture the evil hold that had long gripped the minds of all who wallowed in the absence of the light.
Reverence was born on that day, while the shadows trembled at the implications of what was to follow. So it was that the living responded with profound wonder to the appearance of the divine, for though they were blinded by the temporal flow and by rights should not have recognized the gods, yet the names of the divine were on their lips, for their souls remembered something of eternity, the soul's substance having been drawn hither from eternity to augment the living. This soul, not rightly a part of the earthbound at all, was adjoined to their being by elegant design at a time when those stellar furnaces which first gave rise to life were yet in their infancy. Although its alien mode of consciousness remains severed from the awareness of its living host, the soul when agitated sends reverberations coursing along the bond it shares with the attendant biological entity, until some inkling of forewarning carries into the consciousness of the host, where it manifests as feelings of awe or dread, déjà vu or bliss.
Thus each who was called to the altar of the world to stand in the presence of the holy felt his soul resonate in jubilation, basking in the long awaited fulfillment of promises secured outside the flow of time. As, in truth, the souls' enduring service to Life had always been conditional upon a promised time of fruition, when their long gestation period inside material beings would end with the souls pupating into a final manifestation never before seen. To swim up through the haze between dimensions and fully awaken into the earthly domain had always been their intent.
And so the world was changed. Impact waves spread outward from the source of divine interference and threatened to infect the whole cosmos with newfound perfectability. For several ages, a harmonizing influence pervaded all things and brought order to madness as more and more of the wicked fell under the sway of this radiant new Power and broke from the ranks of their fellows whose efforts to war with divinity only lost ground and unraveled in futility. Mortals who stayed steadfast in the light through these millennia saw themselves blessedly transformed, their evolution hurtling toward the godhead at an unnaturally steep incline and at an impossibly steady pace so that they became adorned in angelic forms and arrayed with spiritual fortitude to match. Souls burned bright with augmented magnitude that bled through into the physical world until they communed directly with the living beings they ensouled. The language of heaven was by this means imparted to denizens of the material realm so that they might become godlike in aspect. The timeless succeeded in grafting itself to ephemeral beings in those days and lifted them from their sad fates into a preternatural wisdom, their eyes alight with nascent divinity. Infused with grace, they salvaged their destinies from the pits and traps set along their path by chaos; they augured the future to find paths of proper action and began to slip the bonds of fate.
Developments such as these sent the evil ones cowering in those deep places no light breached, so certain were they that this fundamental shift in the cosmos signaled their doom. And they were not wrong. Time was against them, and fate no longer in their favor.
All Has Since Been Reversed. To the utmost chagrin of the gods, we have seen the work of the holy undone through the sovereign efforts of infernal lords whose laughter even now infringes upon the edges of your fragile hopes and dreams, fickle mortal, for Time and Fate were never the watchwords of heaven but were instituted by the Dark as a means of accomplishing our own abominable ends at the gods' expense. Heaven, by staging its offensive, managed to usurp these tools and contest the outcome ever so briefly, it is true. And there was indeed a time when our kind knew fear. But I tell thee now: of the machinery of fate, all which matters has since been retaken into the hands of the demon princes. Behold the failure of the light!
When faced with the vastness of time, the mercurial creatures of this life faltered in their vigilance and were taken with distraction. Believing themselves solidified into godhood, they fell away from observance of the rituals that had at first attuned them to the heavens. So, prideful, they did not sense anything amiss when, in through this aperture in their minds, there crawled a menace unforeseen, bent on dismantling their ascendancy! A hellion not born of hell, a sovereign being of infinite strangeness whose name we do not speak and whose origins we do not fathom. Such a one as this now acted at the behest of demonkind to diminish again the souls of mortal angelics, their fates grown too lofty by far. Through blasphemous subterfuge It led their destinies back into bondage, tied them down again into predestination! Once more are mortals born shackled into stunted lives fashioned of injustice and pain sewn together into the cosmic fabric of a broken reality they cannot hope to transcend!
Astoundingly, the gods were also taken at unawares, outmaneuvered by this entity drawn forth from dimensions beyond the frontiers of their omniscience. It passed under their scrutiny unseen, free to wreak ruin upon their earthly designs. Indescribably alien, It confounded the gods' natural defenses, which were ever arrayed only against demonic incursion. The divine, sensing they had become prey, removed to the safety of the blessed realm. In the growing isolation that followed, a veil of confusion and dismay descended over every soul.
As the light leeched out of mortal eyes, events conspired to estrange the living from the divine. Neither comprehended the dark designs worked upon them to dissolve their union; not understanding why their connection was sundered, each blamed the other, alone in defeat. Mortals felt Abandoned by gods who in turn felt Dismissed, driven ever further away from sentient races who now begrimed their souls with actions unforgivable in those of elevated stature. All this was orchestrated from the shadows, the fools having been led astray so as to earn heaven's disdain, keeping their flesh forever unworthy of any renewal of their association with the holy.
In the ages that followed, a devout few vied to remain true to the compact with heaven with all their being, and to repair the divide. But so inconstant are the living, and so evanescent the measure of their lives, that over the centuries the legend of their glorious history grew rife with distortion as the story suffered endless retellings and translations, the timeless truth forced to clothe itself in the particular language and myth given to each of the sordid tribes in order to be heard by the many generations down through the ages. In the end, all that there had once been of genuine historical detail washed away in the flow of ephemera, displaced by all manner of onrushing fraudulent gods and diluted myths. Religions are that which has survived this reduction process the world over; they are but echoes of misguided remembrance; they are each culture's dance of mourning for this ill fated dalliance with the sky people, and their accompanying wish to recover that state of grace.
Naught of the true tale remains anywhere in existence—save for here, within the pages of this vellum, written and recorded herein by those demons who remember it best, whose vigilance has never wavered. Among the dying, any who craves to know the unsullied truth will now find it waiting only within this tome. Those who dare press onward will lay to rest the eternal questions that burn in the hearts of all, for those secrets are laid bare within. Queries that have long gone unanswered by silent misbegotten gods will be mysteries no more. Discover here the last accurate accounting of deep history:
learn of the origins of Life; how it arose from out of the Primordial Dark into a fractured cosmos; its sources of hope; the nature of souls & Oversouls; the function and proper regulation of the afterlife & underworld; the monumental lost purpose of sentient beings; their transmogrification into angelic form; their warring with the hegemony of evil races who had ruled uncontested before the coming of the light; a numbering of those dark forces and a primer on their specific natures; a narrative history of the great earthly construct of the holy; a chronicle of its steward species and their haunted path through time.
The forbidden knowledge is yours; Distill it and turn it to whatever purpose, whether it be your desire to cheat death or obtain lost magics, to reclaim the power gone out of your blood, or to see all of time as a single vista, as do the divine.
Be forewarned! The pursuit of such forbidden truths may come at the cost of sanity for those broken by what they find. For this account also tells of the great defeat of the holy and of the means by which their steward species was undone into damnation. Their objectives in the material world have fallen into dust. The conclusion looms inescapable: the hopes of mortals are baseless and unfounded. Constellations will burn out of the night sky and be replaced, and still longer might Life wait to be rejoined to Purpose, but never will this come to pass, for Our will devours the stars and we have spoken definitively.
Περπατήστε στο Σκοτάδι
the mark of Kriiaahl , compiler
Καταστρέψει Πνεύματος
the mark of Malign Ussaushti , keeper of planetary vigil
Αντοχή πέρα από την κατανόηση
the mark of the archfiend Ixion-Yathcuulqan-zhailezah